Bern sums it up very well. Honestly, TF2 was dead to me when it became free to play, the entire atmosphere of the community just changed. Free to play games just attract a completely different audience, and naturally there was just a massive influx of new players that didn't know what the fuck they were doing. It was clear that TF2 needed that injection of new people but back then I often thought it might've been better to just stay paid and slowly die out. And that's just how TF2 has always been since then: when you join a 24 player server, a maximum of 8 people actually know how to play and the other 16 are cannon fodder. But even then, TF2 is still really fun to me, and calling a game with such a large playing community dead is probably kind of silly. The pre-F2P spark is gone but that turned TF2 from a 9.5/10 game into an 8/10 game and it is still miles better than the half a handful of other arena shooters that are still out there. And sadly it doesn't look like that will change anytime soon, as Overwatch looks to be more like a first person MOBA than an arena shooter, and dirty bomb is way closer to the millitary shooter genre than the arena shooter genre. This is also why I am so genuinely bitter about Tribes Ascend: it came at exactly the right time to grab all the leaving TF2 players and had absolutely everything going for it to (without hyperbole) become my favourite game of all time, and it got utterly destroyed by Hirez wanting to squeeze as much money as possible out of it and dropping it as soon as the well ran dry. Compared to that shit the TF2 dev team have been fucking saints for keeping it running for so long and still being a blast to play after eight years. I mean are there any 8 year old games that haven't drastically decreased in quality? TL;DR TF2 lost its original spark years ago but it's still the best online shooter out there. And considering it's almost 8 years old it could be so much worse right now.